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Still in progress…feedback welcome
Last night I dreamt the world cocooned itself while we slept The frayed edges of the earth wrenched in, like desiccated rose petals Setting sun and furling horizons: a mirrored choreography of opposite movement Red mixed with green mixed with blue mixed with violet mixed with gray, and then, slowly, the color of dark was formed And so, we kept breathing A capturing and comforting canopy, this envelopment arrested the play of time. In the safe harbor of this circadian occurrence, tragedy ceased, sickness rested, death’s woeful course stood in abeyance Imminent trajectories of destruction lost their way in the gloaming, suspending their journey until time was once again unfurled Darkness brought relief. Darkness brought respite. Darkness was peace. Darkness was light And so, we delayed dying Then there was light: mirrored dancing in reverse Eyelids opened from fitful sleep in time with earth stretching back toward infinite lines Color, moisture, movement, the continuance of life and motion. But really, only death The only thing renewed with dawn was the promise of certain sadness and grief And so, we welcomed darkness “There is an ethical urgency to eschatological expectation. There is an awareness that if the ‘possible advent’ indeed comes as unpredictable surprise, like a thief in the night, it always comes through the face of the most vulnerable - the cry of ‘the smallest of these’, the widow, the orphaned, the anguished, the hungry, those who ask: ‘Where are you?’ To reply to this ethical call, it is critical to be able to say I am here. And this being present here and now before the summons of the fragile other, requires that the eschaton still-to-come already intersects, however enigmatically and epiphanically, with the ontological order of being as loving possible. Were this not so, the word God would not longer contain, in Augustine’s phrase, ‘everything we hope for’.” - Strangers, Gods, and Monsters | Richard Kearney
“Faith without faith is precisely such an impossible, a translation of the impossible and impassable, forced to make its way in the midst of an aporia; faith without faith is precisely—faith. Otherwise it is not a battle, not through a glass darkly, but a high road assured of success. The deconstruction of faith, which has nothing to do with its simple destruction—au contraire!—saves faith from closing around itself by opening this wounded discourse to the wound of translatability or substitutability. Undecidability and substitutability do not form a bottomless pit down which every decision is dropped never to be heard from again. They constitute rather the haze of indefiniteness with which decision must daily cope, the gluey, glassy glas which conditions even very ordinary decisions, in which the urgency and passion of decision are nourished. The quasi-theses of translatability, substitutability, undecidability, open up the space in which faith fights its good fight and tries to save its good name.”
- The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida | John D. Caputo 
A photo via Jonathan Harris (http://number27.org) that captures well the disorientation and slippage that comes with encountering the divine.
“Theology comes in answer to the call that issues from the event harbored in the name of God, as a way to hear it, heed it, and hearken to it; to pray over it; and to set the music of this event to words. Theology tries to follow the tracks of the name of God, to stay on the trail it leaves behind as it makes its way through our lives. The name of God, it should be insisted, is not a term of art, a technical or lifeless word coined by philosophers for their speculative purposes, but it is a word forged in the fires of life, in the joys and sorrows of ordinary life, a word we invoke on the most casual as on the most solemn occasions, signaling something familiar, even commonplace, yet bottomless, always on the tip of our tongues, yet incomprehensible.”
- The Weakness of God | John D. Caputo 
A reflection after reading After the Death of God, by Caputo, Vattimo and Robbins: “The cover of After the Death of God represents well the very ideas contained within the book. The imagery itself is striking: a complete solar eclipse, with the moon covering the entirety of the sun and the sun reaching out past the fringes of that which seeks to cover it. A better image for the more recent history of philosophy cannot be imagined. The eclipse of the metaphysical God has long been heralded as the death of religion, as the death of magic and supernaturalism that has now cleared the way for humanity’s return to the natural, to something outside the binding and totalitarian fixtures of religion. But that message has grown tired as of late; though its harbingers may have wished its duration permanent, the eclipsing entity has waned, revealing a new and different God who no longer shines with metaphysical certainty but solicits with unequivocal intensity. The image itself, poised with possibility and perhaps even danger, asks the question posed by the title of the book: after the death of God, what? After the eclipsing body wanes, what? For on the other side of the eclipse, after the brief triumphalism of the autumnal experience, the sun shines through. This is certainly not to say that the metaphysical God remains; speaking perspectivally, just as the power and awe of the sun is tempered for the viewer by its ability to be eclipsed, shut out, and temporarily erased, the power, or perhaps the supposed ontological reality of the metaphysical God is tempered, even permanently muted by its own eclipsing. Our new perspective on the sun is analogous to our new perspective on God.”
A Proposition :
Perhaps theology is the project of telling a story about a God who has rent the fabric of our existence, leaving us bruised, shattered and broken, trying to pick up the pieces in order to explain what just happened. Our explanations of this event and all its attending consequences inevitably take the form of telling a story about ourselves, the world we inhabit, and the God who haunts us. |
